International Coffee Day!

Today 1st October is the first International Coffee Day though you may have not heard about it yet. I myself learned about it not so long ago: I was browsing through internet and wanted to check a future event from the International Coffee Association and then I stumbled upon it.
Personally, I am not so in favour of all those international days, but hey, it is coffee and we love it, we drink it everyday and so maybe everyday should be international coffee day. Anyway, I was curious and read about why they came up with this… and I liked the story behind.

Apparently many countries already had a National Coffee day (I didn’t know that either) so the association wanted to gather all these smaller celebrations and come up with a special day for all coffee lovers worldwide:
To honour the men and women who grow and harvest the coffee we love
To celebrate the journey of coffee from the farm to the coffee place
To celebrate a journey of diversity, quality and passion

And they got me! So at my coffee business we subscribed an event to also celebrate 1st October:  http://internationalcoffeeday.org/international-coffee-day-events-netherlands-engrano/

I feel that the International Coffee Day is a good reason to consider not only the coffee as a drink but everybody involved in making this coffee possible.
Most people who love and drink coffee are not aware of the long journey each cup of coffee has followed so I will try to write about it in this blog in the coming months. In a nut shell: there are a lot of people working hard to be able to plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, transport, roast, pack and sell coffee. Even though we nowadays appreciate coffee more for its taste and for the whole feel-good-experience of drinking it, the coffee market is still mainly a commodity market which main purpose is to commercialize a brown beverage containing caffeine while taste is just secondary. But let us start to change this: let us today honour the people who grow and harvest the coffee. How? Maybe by learning a bit more about your coffee and its taste knowing when and where it was grown. So many factors influence the coffee taste among others: the type of bean, the altitude and the soil where it was grown, if it had shade
or not, the amount of rain. Another interesting factor is the way the coffee bean was cleaned out of the coffee cherry. So you could understand better how your coffee got its flavour.

Labour conditions of people growing coffee vary a lot in different countries. Fair trade coffee typically assures that coffee farmers get a reasonable price for their coffee and additionally some fair trade brands also require that coffee plantations that fulfill a minimum standard of labour conditions. However, note that those minimum labour conditions may vary among different fair trade organizations. Also, if a coffee is not fair trade it doesn’t automatically mean that the coffee growing people live under bad conditions or that coffee farmers get underpaid. Small coffee roasting companies with a passion for coffee often trade directly with the farmers and thus also do fair trade (though they are not certified) whereas companies that see coffee mainly as commodity may just try to get the coffee at the lowest possible price. If you’re curious how your coffee was obtained you could for instance check the website of your the store where you buy the coffee and see if that information is available.

Since most of the coffee is grown between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer while the highest coffee consumption (per inhabitant) is registered in countries above the tropics international trading is an important and necessary part of production and consumption of coffee. It could be interesting to know how many kilometers your coffee traveled to get to you.

Lets today celebrate the diversity and the quality of our coffees but most of all lets share our passion for it!

Cheers (with coffee) and lets all enjoy a happy coffee day!